Posts Tagged: NYC

Getting ready for Iron Chef America, with Michael Symon in the doorway. Self-portrait. God, do I feel lucky. I’m flown in to NYC to judge Iron Chef America at the Food Network, which allows me to do all kinds of other amazing things, since they don’t care when I come or go and I have dear pals with whom I can stay. I’ve joined CAA, which wants me to help me do more fun stuff, and I met with really interesting smart TV producers—one of whom, amazingly, also took a writing class with my mentor, RP. Iron Chef’s judges table. Photo by Michael Ruhlman. First night there, solo, and dying to see a good show, I asked my hostess, Amazing Annie, what to see. “Go see Cock—it’s great and an easy ticket.” It is and it was. But more Read On »

When I was a sophomore at Duke, 1982, I fell in love with a beautiful freshman on a delirious post-Dead-show spinning fall late afternoon on Duke’s main quad. We dated all that year and I moved to Manhattan to work for the summer as an intern at a magazine to be with her. Her parents took us to Shun Lee West, her favorite Chinese restaurant, a few blocks from Lincoln Center. One of her father’s best friends was Arthur Gelb, managing editor of The New York Times, whom I met frequently throughout that summer. We talked about writing, and he electrified me with stories of reporting and the newspaper life. He was a galvanic newspaper man, lionized in Gay Talese’s The Kingdom and the Power, biographer of Eugene O’Neill with his wife Barbara, and discoverer of great Read On »

I spent a couple days in New York last week meeting with two very good publishers, one of whom, a veteran and very smart editor, asked whether I’d thought about how busy people can actually integrate real cooking and real food into their daily lives. He wasn’t talking about the crispy pig I had at Maialino hours later. That, as you can see, is real food and real good. (Two standbys for me in NYC, where I go just to feel good, because NYC makes me all jittery and my eyes go out of sync like that Mad-eye guy in Harry Potter but not in a useful way: Bar Boulud and any one of Danny Meyer’s restaurants. It’s not just the food, it’s the service [and yes, I paid full price, even left my VISA Read On »